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Did the Traditional ChineseEven Want a Scientific Revolution?

The advanced state of society in 14th century China inspired awe in those few foreigners who managed to travel there.

Chinese civilization had all the key technologies that Europeans later saw as a foundation for their own scientific revolution. In 1620, Francis Bacon observed that three technologies had transformed the face of European civilization: printing, gunpowder, and the nautical compass. All three were, in fact, inventions of the Chinese, and were already fully utilized by the time of the Song dynasty.

In the 14th century, China was, in the words of economist Justin Yifu Lin, “probably the most cosmopolitan, technologically advanced and economically powerful civilization in the world,” and had “reached the threshold level for a full-fledged scientific and industrial revolution.” Lin goes on to ask: “Why did the Industrial Revolution not occur in China in the fourteenth century? At that time, almost every element that economists and historians usually considered to be a major contributing factor to the Industrial Revolution in late eighteenth-century England also existed in China.”

Asking the wrong question

Historians have gone to some lengths trying to provide answers to this conundrum. Some have focused on demographics and economics. Others point to the destructive impact of the Mongol conquests. Some theories have focused on sociocultural aspects of Chinese civilization. For example, the examination system for the civil service – an essential path to high status – was stultifying by modern standards, forcing students to spend six years memorizing every word of the canon of Confucian classics.

What does one do with this flurry of opinions, each of which may contain some nugget of truth, but none of which seems to solve the entire puzzle satisfactorily? A renowned scholar of Chinese culture, Nathan Sivin, exasperatedly declared: “I have encountered no question more often than why modern science did not develop independently in China, and none on which more firmly based opinions have been formed on the basis of less critical attention to available evidence.”

Sivin’s response was that this was the wrong question to ask in the first place. What’s the point, he retorts, in asking why something didn’t occur? “It is obvious to anyone who has studied a little history that to explain what did not happen is about as rigorous as fiction. What did happen was the emergence of early modern science in Europe. It is Europe that needs to be understood.”

Sivin goes on, crucially, to point out the hidden cultural preconceptions that have led to this question. “Above all,” he observes, “we usually assume that the Scientific Revolution is what everybody ought to have had. But it is not at all clear that scientific theory and practice of a characteristically modern kind were what other societies yearned for before they became, in recent times, an urgent matter of survival amidst violent change.”

Sivin’s insight illuminates how, ever since the West’s scientific revolution and consequent domination of the rest of the world, modern scientific thinking has become unreflectively accepted as the norm to which all other cultures should have aspired. If another civilization evolved in an alternative direction, this is unquestioningly assumed to have been a failure.

A Western cultural assumption

This cultural assumption can be found in a wide range of learned books written by scholars of high repute. A thoughtful and deeply researched book by Toby Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science, is nevertheless littered with references to what he characterizes as “the riddle of the success of modern science in the West – and its failure in non-Western civilizations.” Huff refers repeatedly to “the failure of Arab science to yield modern science” and “the failure of China to give birth to modern science.”

In another example Joel Mokyr, a leading historian on this subject, reflects: “And yet China failed to become what Europe eventually became… The implications of this failure for world history are awesome to contemplate. The Chinese were, so to speak, within reach of world domination, and then shied away.” Implicit in Mokyr’s narrative is the assumption that the Chinese wanted world domination but failed to succeed in this obvious goal. However, world domination was neither a natural nor desired goal from the Chinese perspective.

Since Sivin’s conceptual breakthrough, many scholars of Chinese culture have come to share his viewpoint. “Indeed,” writes one team, “it is like asking why a man setting out for New York fails to arrive in Chicago. He simply wasn't headed there.”

Rephrasing the question

Sinologist A. C. Graham poses an alternative question to ask about China, noting that “the formation of an empire, covering a fifth of mankind and still, after several thousand years, surviving even the extreme pressures of the 20th century, is an event which like the Scientific Revolution has happened only once in history.” How, he asks, did China achieve such an unrivaled record of cultural stability?

If China was indeed heading somewhere other than a scientific revolution, what was their projected destination? Once we relinquish the value-tinged perspective of asking about China’s “failure” to achieve a scientific revolution, this frees us to inquire more meaningfully about the implicit goals of the Chinese cultural paradigm.

In our current global system, which has fully imbibed the values equating the scientific revolution with success and other trajectories as failure, is there anything of value we can learn about a system that utilized science and technology for a different purpose?